Goethe's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" – power over wisdom
26 comments
·January 26, 2025GnarfGnarf
This is about the root of humanity’s problem: the inability to avoid misusing knowledge and technology. All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end (Thoreau)
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KeplerBoy
Oh god this poem. It's like generational trauma in German speaking countries. At some point during junior high every student is tasked with learning to recite it by heart. Of course it's not too hard, but there are a million things a thirteen year old kid would rather do.
inanutshellus
My high school's version of this was the Middle English version of Canterbury Tale's prologue. We'd then have to recite the first stanza or two in front of the class, one at a time.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-...
_glass
I started my PhD thesis with the poem. Because I love the tech angle.
ta2112
Dukas should get a mention alongside Disney. Paul Dukes wrote the symphonic poem L’Apprenti Sorcier (1897) based on Goethe’s poem, which was later animated by Disney for the film Fantasia.
cainxinth
The rate of technological change is accelerating because technology begets technology. Meanwhile, the rate of growth in wisdom is linear at best (and occasionally stagnant or in retreat). Frankly, it doesn’t bode all that well.
pavlov
Mankind seems to forget every lesson after two generations.
Holocaust survivors are still with us, but the kind of nationalism that put them through that ordeal is on the rise again and is gaining popularity with teenagers.
Technology could help, but right now it seems to be working the other way.
retrac
> Technology could help, but right now it seems to be working the other way.
If history does teach us anything, the moral ambiguity of technological progress is surely one of the lessons of the 20th century. I think it might be one of those lessons we're forgetting again after a couple generations!
throw_pm23
It may be because there are rarely such simplistic rule-based lessons. To your example, nationalism could be a great emancipatory force in one century and an instrument of great suffering in another. If there is some takeaway, then it must be more subtle than "nationalism=evil".
pavlov
You’ll notice that I qualified it with “the kind of nationalism that…”
I don’t have a problem with the kind of nationalism that gave European minority languages pride in their own culture and literature in the 19th century, for example.
I do have a problem with the kind of nationalism exemplified by lots of 20th century European leaders from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Milosevic.
The latter kind is sadly on the rise again. And the former isn’t endemic to nationalism. Everyone can have pride in their identity, it doesn’t need a state apparatus.
pithanyChan
Top down & middle-out disruption of information flow impedes acceleration of wisdom.
Ponzis and lesser people* at work.
*those who can't score without harmful sabotage
Sparring, cumulative competition, is a thing that drives the evolution of all parties and has the potential to rebalance the scales over and over again, but consumer culture and portfolio capitalism failed to capitalize on that and monetized the opposite instead: envy and sabotage.
Some people were too afraid of natural human convection and ruined the game. It still works, of course, but
> it doesn't bode all that well.
52-6F-62
Wisdom doesn’t need to grow, it is eternal. It needs to be learned and accessed.
Key to understanding is to work to understand rather than redefine these concepts in the light of the same modernity that gave us domineering technological prowess at all costs.
twojacobtwo
> Wisdom doesn’t need to grow
This seems to imply that we've gained all the wisdom there is to gain. Do you believe that's true?
meristohm
Yeah, feels like we've largely lost touch with the Wisdom of a reciprocal existence within this ecosystem, the "Garden of Eden" through a Christian lens, or the way the Haudenosaunee Confederacy lived pre-Columbus.
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neom
funny this is here, two Sundays ago I was sitting looking out the window just letting my mind wander when I thought "genesis isn't being interpreted correctly". I went for to church for a couple of years as a kid but I can't say I know much of religion, I put the thought aside and carried on my day. Later I thought again "I wonder why I was thinking about Genesis being incorrectly discussed, what does genesis even say?". Again I put the thought aside but a few hours later found myself researching genesis... and then the bible, vedicism, laozi, thoth, gnosis, and then and then and then...all the extra hours till a couple of days ago I spent researching and reading. Along the way I ended up producing 3 documents, this was the first of the 3: https://s.h4x.club/JruQOrjy (it's a bit weird, and not really sure why it came out)
According to my friends who i've shared the above with because I felt like I was going a little...nuts...I'm "at that period of my life where these type of things are going to happen" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
glial
I really loved your essay! It reminds me of the discuss in Genesis of Call Me Ishmael. Thanks for sharing...and I'd love to know if you post the other 2.
bloomingkales
Do you get scared when you find yourself believing? Because I was never spiritual like this either until somewhat later in life.
There’s a real element of “holy shit I believe in God”. I never thought I would.
It is very new for me to accept that we were probably always here, and probably always be, in various forms.
hn_acc1
Quite interesting. After being raised fundamentalist / evangelical and quite strongly so, in my late 40s I had a "holy shit, I NO LONGER believe in God" moment.. That was quite a thing, and I never thought I would think that way.. It was quite some time to get there, and not one specific thing that triggered it, just a general acceptance of the randomness and meaninglessness of life..
neom
Well a) I don't know where it came from and b) it was quite a lot of work, I really did hours and hours and hours of reading and research very quickly. So scared isn't quite right, also because I guess I don't know what I "believe" yet as there are so many layers. I've spent a lot of the time in the last few days focusing on 15 or so events throughout history, unbound to time or geography, beating any form of truly spiritual path out of us and at every single step it seems to be deeply analytical thought relegating spiritual exploration not even to a couple of classes a week in high school but to "fun stories and myths" - I'm sure I've discussed this intellectually somehow over the years but only very recently did it become a part of me. The second document I wrote was basically focusing on compounding societal, natural and spiritual crisis all coalescing at some point in the fairly near future. The 3rd thing I produced is this kinda intense, long, very technical outline of everything I'd learned in the form of a "podcast from AI" heh: https://s.h4x.club/X6uGEpRG
bloomingkales
I’m going through something like this too with zero religious background. Lately I’m of the belief that if you take a look at your life, you’ll see that most of it wasn’t really a coincidence. Tough thing to share but it’s my overall underlying feeling.
Not me:
https://medium.com/machine-cognition/objective-reality-doesn...
It's a good poem. I learned the original off by heart two months ago to recite it to my sleep-averse child as part of their bedtime routine. It definitely benefits from recitation, which really unearths the lovely wavelike rythms.
(edit: this translation does a good job of matching the syllable count, almost perfectly. It does mean it strains a bit in places. But compromises always have to be made!)